Kerouac, on the field …
… off the field, on again, off again, then “on the road.”
Did you know that Jack Kerouac, author of the “beat movement” novel On the Road was a stellar football player in high school and, for a time, college? It’s true. I mentioned this briefly in a post in January.
As a standout all-state gridder at Lowell High School in Massachusetts he caught the attention of several college coaches, including Lou Little of Columbia.
He turned down other scholarship offers, including Boston College, to attend one year of prep school at Horace Mann Prep, arranged by Coach Little, before enrolling at Columbia in 1940.
Unfortunately, Kerouac suffered a broken leg during the second game of his freshman season at Columbia. He soon dropped out of school. After a failed attempt as a sportswriter he became a merchant seaman1 before returning to Columbia two years later, in the fall of 1942, rejoining the Lions squad.
When he returned Coach Little had high hopes for Kerouac as chronicled in newspaper clippings.
But his return was short-lived. It seems part of the problem was a misunderstanding between Little and the Kerouac family who believed the coach had promised to find Jack’s dad a job in New York. It didn’t materialize.
Jack dropped out of Columbia again, and his football career ended there, but he continued hanging out in the neighborhood — it’s where he made the friendships that influenced his budding literary career.
Interestingly, many of his teammates and coaches appeared in his semi-autobiographical novels, though their names were changed, i.e., Coach Lou Little is Guido Pistola in Vanity of Dulouz and All-American Paul Governali is Mike Romanino.
Here’s a trivia note: While Kerouac was a merchant seaman, 1941-42, he was a civilian serving on the army troopship “Dorchester.” Kerouac traversed the Atlantic without incident, but the “Dorchester” was torpedoed in 1943 resulting in the loss of many lives, including the heroic four chaplains featured in an earlier post.